The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Policy Institute has released a historic study called 'Living in the Margins: A National Survey of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Asian and Pacific Islander Americans.' The document is based on data from the largest-ever national survey of Asian and Pacific Islander ( API ) LGBT residents of the United States.
The report is based on survey responses from 863 people. The Internet survey took place June-Sept. 2006 in several languages, including English, Chinese, Vietnamese and Korean.
Among the more upsetting results are 75 percent of respondents reported experiencing sexual orientation-based discrimination and/or harassment, while 85 percent reported dealing with racial/ethnic bias. A startling 98 percent of the participants stated that they had faced some type of discrimination during their lives.
Other key findings include:
-Harassment, media representation, marriage equality and immigration are the most important issues to API LGBT individuals. At the bottom of the list are housing, police misconduct, affirmative action and drugs.
Only half of the participants said that English is their native language, which means difficult times for LGBT individuals with Asian native tongues as there are relatively few items printed in an Asian language.
-Forty-seven percent of the individuals identified themselves as gay, while 19 percent said they are lesbian and 9 percent said they are bisexual; 20 percent called themselves 'queer.'
-Of the respondents, 5 percent lived in Illinois. Of those, 93 percent said that they had encountered race- or ethnicty-based discrimination and/or harassment. Also, only 39 percent of the individuals pointed to English as their native language.
The full report is at www.thetaskforce.org .
